Books

Books

Writing Faith. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2017. This book provides a novel reevaluation of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive account of writing. Derrida’s various essays on writing's materiality in books, scrolls, typewriters and digital displays briefly touched on the question of religion. At times he directed his attention to the mediatic nature of Christianity. However, such comments have rarely been applied to formal aspects of religious texts. In response, this book investigates the rise of the Christian codex in its second-to-fifth-century-CE Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts. By better understanding the religious nature of this technical development, it becomes possible to reframe writing's coincidence with faith.

The idea of a book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy.

— Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

The revolution that has begun is, above all, a revolution in the media and forms that transmit the written word. In this sense, the present revolution has only one precedent in the West: the substitution of the codex for the volumen - of the book composed of quires for the book in the form of a roll - during the first centuries of the Christian era.

— Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings

Religion after Secularization in Australia. Edited. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. Religion’s persistent and new visibility in political life has prompted a significant global debate. One of its key features concerns the nature and impact of secularization. This book intervenes in two ways. Firstly, it provides summative accounts of the history, culture and legal interactions that have informed Australia’s unique example. Secondly, it critically analyzes secular political theory concerning the public sphere, deliberative politics and democratic practices. The compendium aims to propel the debate in new directions and promote urgently needed public understanding. My own contribution focused on hermeneutics in deliberative democracies.

Something therein that loves a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast... Before I built a wall I’d ask to know, What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense.

— Robert Frost, Mending Wall

Protestant Metaphysics after Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. London; Eugene: SCM Press; Wipf & Stock, 2010. Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger are doubtless two of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century. This book investigates how the question of being developed through their respective accounts of protestant theology. Whereas Heidegger suggested a post-onto-theological pathway, Barth inverted the question of being in a thoroughgoing theological ontology. In the end, both reconfigured the relationship between philosophy and theology in ways that continue to shape contemporary debate.

If I were yet to write a theology—to which I sometimes feel inclined—then the word ‘being’ would not be allowed to occur in it. Faith has no need of the thinking of being. If faith has recourse to it, it is already not faith. Luther understood this.

— Martin Heidegger, "The Reply to the Third Question At the Seminar in Zürich, 1951"

A free theologian does not deny, nor is he ashamed of, his indebtedness to a particular philosophy or ontology, to ways of thought and speech.